Here we will see how we can use the IDE for editing OMB scripts. The 11gR2 release is based on the common Oracle platform IDE used also by JDeveloper. It comes with a bunch of standard behavior for editing and rendering code. One of the lesser known things is that if you drop a text file into OWB you can edit it. So you can drop your tcl scripts right into OWB and edit in-place, and don’t need another IDE like Eclipse just for this task.

Cool, so you have the file here. There may be no line numbers, you can toggle line numbers on by right clicking in the gutter.

If we edit the file within the OWB IDE, the save is a little different from normal. OWB doesn’t normally manipulate files so things like ctrl-s to save, saves the OWB objects, but if you edit a file the closing of the file will ask if you want to save it – check it out.

Now we enter the realm of ‘he who dares’…. Note the IDE doesn’t know about tcl files out of the box, so you see above there is no syntax highlighting. The code is identified by the extension… .java is java, .html is HTML etc. With OWB, the OMB scripts are tcl, we usually have .tcl extension on these files. One of the things we can do to trick up the syntax highlighting is to simply rename the file to have a .java suffix, then all of a sudden we get syntax highlighting, see the illustration here where side by side we see a the file with a .java extension and a .tcl extension.

Not ideal pretending to be .java but gets us a way to having something more useful than notepad. We can then change the syntax highlighting such that we get Eclipse like highlighting within the IDE from the Tools Preferences option;

You then get the Eclipse like rendering albeit using a little tweak on the file names…

Might be useful if you are doing any kind of heavy duty OMB script development and just want a single IDE. The OMBPlus panel is then at hand for executing and testing it out.